If you look for some kind of predictability in the films of Richard Linklater, you won’t find it. He dives into high school life in Dazed and Confused, lingers in a fitful long-term international romance in his three pictures with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy; he worked with the animation technique called rotoscoping in Waking Life, filmed a long study of a family in Boyhood, and now with Hit Man, he puts life and humor into one of the tired clichés of recent movies.
The hit man in the movie is blandly-named Gary Johnson (Glen Powell). Johnson is an undistinguished psychology teacher in a college in New Orleans with a flair for gadgets that gets him hooked up with the police department. He helps undercover officers with their secret recording devices. But the cop who usually plays the hit man with people who are soliciting a killing, can’t do it. Gary is rushed into the job — even though he has to borrow a pair of pants because real hit men don’t wear shorts. It turns out, according to the movie, that real hit men don’t exist outside of movies, so what they wear is probably a matter of costuming, not actuality.
For a playful few moments Gary sends a good range of social types off to prison, but Hit Man’s play-acting then spills into a place where the game gets tough. Madison Figueroa Masters (Adria Arjona) wants her husband killed. Gary finds her cute and sexy. He talks her out of it. And they spark.
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One way to look at Hit Man is that it’s about what acting can do to an actor. Easy-going Gary turns harsh in his hit man role for the police. He likes what he discovers in himself, and doesn’t want to let go — especially if it gets him someone like Madison.
So, he jumps back and forth between being Gary teaching his classes and looking dorky, and then Gary as Ron, the hard-nosed undercover agent who skirts the legal line of entrapment as he gets people to commit to hiring a killer. The movie slides into these confusions of identities and psychologies like easy-listening elevator Musak. No muss. No fuss. And best of all, no pretention.
Hit Man doesn’t look like a tough psychological piece about Gary’s real self or anything like that. But it is. The picture moves so seamlessly, you’re just there. And Gary gets stuck in rationalizing over who he is at any moment — as when Madison sends him a text for the first time.
Things get dicier when friends or colleagues see Gary, as Ron, having an ice cream, or at a carnival with Madison. Gary/Ron and Madison run into her not-yet-ex-husband. And she has a pistol.
The city of New Orleans itself comments on the contradictions and confusions in Gary/Ron’s life. There really is a streetcar named Desire, and after one erotic sequence between Ron and Madison, the film cuts to the street signs at the corner of Piety and Pleasure.
As Richard Linklater films the city, the pleasures are great, but something always lingers at the corners. Who is Gary — or Ron — when you get right down to the notion of identity? And you have to wonder just who this Madison is: Pleasure and Piety.
Hit Man is available for streaming on Netflix.
